Peter Rhodes asks, where are the Salisbury attackers? Plus a happy meal and the terminal tale of a royal raven

She's been baptised into the Church of England and is being tutored on the history and legends of the realm including, presumably, the one about the ravens at the Tower of London. They have been there since the days of Charles II and, according to folklore, if the six resident ravens ever leave, the kingdom will fall. You might assume from this that the Tower ravens never go missing. Think again.

IN his splendid book, A Shadow Above: The Fall and Rise of the Raven, Joe Shute tells of a Scottish sheep farmer plagued by ravens who got a special licence to cull them. His first shot brought down a raven with a metal tag on its foot which read: "Tower of London, property of Her Majesty the Queen."

TALKING of iconic animals, I cannot be the only person alarmed to see the burger chain McDonald's has a promotional partnership with the makers of the new Peter Rabbit film. Run, Peter! For God's sake, run!

I SEND as few emails as possible. I never text. I don't use social media. And yet, oh folly, in an unguarded moment I recently sent a friend an image of my lunch, cleverly re-arranged into a cheerful face with a big pastie nose and a smile of roast potatoes. As you do. Goodness knows what the global data-filching industry will make of this. Clearly Citizen Rhodes enjoys pasties and has an artistic bent, and too much time on his hands.

THREE weeks on, there is a character, or possibly several characters, missing from the Salisbury nerve-gas drama. They are, of course, the attackers. Where are they? In a country festooned with CCTV, there are no images or even a photo-fit appeal. I love a good Kremlin-Mafia assassination theory as much as the next person but in this case, isn't it time to start thinking outside the box?

THERE'S no shortage of theories about how the deadly substance was administered (slipped in suitcase, inserted in car heater, etc), but still no trace of any villains. All we have is one injured policeman, thankfully recovering, and two contaminated Russians who have been unconscious from the time they were found. Given the absence of first-hand testimony, why have the authorities seemed so positive from the outset that this was attempted murder? This is only a hunch and I may well be proved wrong, but I'm not yet convinced that anybody attacked anyone.

A READER suggests that Biggles, the fictional boys' hero created by Captain W E Johns, was a pilot of the First World War, not the Second as I wrote last week. In fact, Biggles, born in 1899, rejoined the RAF in 1939. Fifteen Biggles books are set in WW2 and Johns was writing Biggles yarns until he died in 1968. Incidentally, the book Biggles Flies Undone is pure urban myth.